Rulah: I’ve got Ularon! Gahncai, we’re coming in! How’s the room?Gahncai: Temple. Masterwork statues. Otherwise secure.Rulah: Except for the door.Gahncai: You told me to bust the door down.Rulah: I had the idea that it’d be busted in such a way that it wouldn’t stop us, but it would stop a horde of goblins.Gahncai: Well, it’s busted so the winners can eat the losers and then pick their teeth.Bria: I’m not eating goblins!

Rulah: You little—Goblin: NONONononoooo Rulah: Hrah!Goblin:Skreee!Rulah: Wow. Alright. Bria! Ularon is down and we’ve got a pit trap in front of us!Bria: Regular, spikes, or acid?Rulah: Gimme a sec.Bottom of the Pit: Splurk!Rulah: Spikes.

Last week I wrote about Keyforge and its intriguing attempt to “fix” Magic. I want it to succeed, but it won’t. Nothing will ever supplant Magic as the grindy, pay-to-win king of the CCG genre. It’s got too much market share and the pay-to-win stuff is a feature, not a bug, for the most committed players. There are ways to create something better than Magic though.

I’m committed to Dead Parents Dungeon right now—

—shut up, I am—

—and even though I’m too lazy to do any actual work on it, I take that commitment seriously enough that I’m not getting into it too deeply.

Only a little bit.

Electronic

Ideally, it’d be electronic. A lot of the bitch is based on real, physical cards, so why electronic? Electronic cards can be changed. A card that costs 5 to play today can cost 4 tomorrow. Imagine grouping cards by seasons and shifting their power up or down four times a year (if by some unlikely chance a Magic developer is reading this, you’ll have to imagine it with a lot of aspirin). Is this card valuable now? No. But it could be.

Good ol’ Lightning Bolt

Magic believes in bad cards. I believe in cards that are good in certain contexts; Lightning Bolt is a solid card when your opponent starts with twenty life and you can put 4 of them into a 60-card deck. In Commander, when your opponent starts with forty life and you have 1 Lightning Bolt in 99 cards, it’s garbage.